Farts, fake sweat, and Paul Mescal’s most embarrassing moment: “Trying to preserve our dignity”
There are several very good reasons why intimacy coordinators have begun to be a necessary presence on almost every film set these days, but usually they’re not required to step in if one of the actors has a ‘flatulent moment’, like Paul Mescal once experienced.
Back in 2020, before most people had even heard of Mescal or Daisy Edgar-Jones, an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s popular 2018 novel Normal People hit the BBC within a couple of weeks of everyone in the country being locked in their own homes due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It proved to be incredibly serendipitous for both actors, because the programme became something of a must-watch, with a captive audience and the obvious talent of both combining to propel them to stardom.
Although the story, about two teenagers coming of age and falling in love in a small Irish town, was compelling enough, the show also featured rather a lot of (gasp) fairly graphic sex, which, given that quite a few people were shut up indoors with their parents, proved to be quite awkward on occasion.
But perhaps not quite as awkward as for the main protagonists, as Mescal explained some time later to the Daily Mirror, recalling, “On the Friday of the first week, me and Daisy had to do a day of sex scenes, and we were covered in this gel called Egyptian Magic. It’s basically fake sweat. We had to switch positions, and our bodies were in close contact.”
Unfortunately for the pair, being starkers and writhing around over each other proved anything but sexy, especially with what happened next. Mescal continued, “When we separated, it made a really loud fart noise. Me and Daisy started hysterically laughing, but the crew and director all thought that one of us had farted and really were trying to preserve our dignity.”
Accidental farting aside, which after all is something all ‘normal people’ do, the show proved just as successful outside of the UK too, winning two Golden Globe nominations, including a nod for Edgar-Jones, plus an Emmy Award nomination for Mescal.
He used the exposure as a jumping-off point and had a meteoric few years, winning a Laurence Olivier Award for his work in the theatre starring as the lead in A Streetcar Named Desire, and following that up with a Bafta win and an Academy Award nomination for his 2023 movie Aftersun, an affecting tale of a father looking back at his life with his daughter.
Things are unlikely to quieten down for him over the next couple of years either, as he will appear in all four of Sam Mendes’ Beatles biopics, due to be released in 2028, with his own instalment being that of Paul McCartney, whom he has been seen shadowing over the past year or so.
He will also be teaming up once more with his Oscar-winning co-star in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley, this time for a movie called Hold on to Your Angels, which promises to be a supernatural love story set in the Deep South of America. He’s also starring in an upcoming Richard Linklater movie about a Broadway composer who leaves New York to make movies in Los Angeles, called Merrily We Roll Along.
